Video transcript

Hank: All members of the kingdom Animalia need oxygen to make energy. Oxygen is compulsory. Without oxygen, we die. But as you know, the byproduct of
the process that keeps us all alive, cellular respiration, is
carbon dioxide or CO2, and it doesn't do our
bodies a bit of good. So not only do we need
to take in the oxygen, we also got to get rid of the CO2. And that's why we have the
respiratory and circulatory systems, to bring in oxygen from
the air with our lungs, circulate it to all of our cells
with our heart and arteries, and collect the CO2 that we
don't need with our veins, and dispose of it with
the lungs when we exhale. (lively music) Now when you think of
the respiratory system, the first thing that you
probably think of is the lungs. But some animals can take
in oxygen without lungs by a process called simple diffusion, which allows gases to move into
and pass through wet membranes. For instance, arthropods have
little pores all over their bodies that just let oxygen wander into
their body where it's absorbed by special respiratory structures. Amphibians can take in
oxygen through their skin, although they also have their
lungs or gills to help them respire because getting all your oxygen by way
of diffusion takes freaking forever. So why do we have to have
these stupid lung things instead of just using simple diffusion? Well, a couple of reasons. For starter, the bigger the
animal, the more oxygen it needs, and a lot of mammals are pretty big, so we have to actively
force air into our lungs in order to get enough
oxygen to run our bodies. Also, mammals and birds are warm-blooded, which means that they have to
regulate their body temperatures, and that takes many, many calories, and burning those calories
requires lots of oxygen. Finally, in order for oxygen
to pass through a membrane, the membrane has to be wet. So for a newt to take
oxygen in through its skin, the skin has to be moist all the time, which, for a newt, isn't a big deal, but I don't particularly
want to be constantly moist. Do you? Fish need oxygen too, of course, but they observe oxygen that's
already dissolved in the water through their gills. If you've ever seen a fish gill, you'll remember that they're
just a bunch of filaments of tissue layered together. This gill tissue extracts dissolved
oxygen and excretes the carbon dioxide. Still, there are some fish
that have lungs, like lungfish, which we call lungfish
because they have lungs, and that's actually where lungs
first appeared in the animal kingdom. All animals, from reptiles on up,
respire with lungs deep in their bodies, basically right behind the heart. While us more complex
animals can't use diffusion to get oxygen directly, our lungs can. Lungs are chock-full of
oxygen-dissolving membranes that are kept moist with mucus. "Moist with Mucus,"
another great band name. The key to these bad boys is that
lungs have a ton of surface area, so they can absorb a
lot of oxygen at once. You wouldn't know from looking at them, but human lungs contain
about 75 square meters of oxygen-dissolving membrane. That's bigger than the roof of my house. The simple diffusion that your
lungs use is pretty freaking simple. You and I breathe oxygen in
through our nose and mouth. It passes down a pipe called your larynx, which then splits off from your
esophagus and turns into your trachea, which then branches to form two bronchi, one of which goes into each lung. These bronchi branch off again, forming narrower and narrower
tubes called bronchioles. These bronchioles eventually
end in tiny sacs called alveoli. Each alveolus is about a fifth
of a millimeter in diameter, but each of us has about
300 million of them, and these, friends, is
where the magic happens. Alveoli are little bags
of thin moist membranes, and they're totally covered in tiny
narrow blood-carrying capillaries. Oxygen dissolve through the membrane and is absorbed by the
blood in these capillaries, which then goes off through
the circulatory system to make cells all over your
body happy and healthy. But while the alveoli are
handing over the oxygen, the capillaries are switching
it out for carbon dioxide that the circulatory system just
picked up from all over the body. The alveoli and capillaries basically
just swap one gas for another. From there, the alveoli takes
that CO2 and squeezes it out through the bronchioles,
the bronchi, the trachea, finally out of your nose and/or mouth. So inhale for me once, congratulations. Oxygen is now in your blood stream. Now exhale. Wonderful! The CO2 has now left the building, and you don't even have to think about it, so you could think about
something more important, like how many Cheetos you could
realistically fit into your mouth at the same time? So now you're all, "Yeah,
that's great, Hank, "but how do lungs actually work? "How do they do the thing where they do "where they get moved to
come in and out and stuff?" Well, eloquent question, well-asked. Lungs work like a pump, but they don't actually
have any muscles in them that cause them to contract and expand. For that, we have this
big flat layer of muscles that sits right underneath the
lungs called the thoracic diaphragm. At the end of an exhalation, your diaphragm is relaxed. Picture an arc pushing up
on the bottom of your lungs and crowding them out so that
they don't have very much volume. But when you breathe in, the diaphragm contracts and flattens out, allowing the lungs to open up. As we know from physics, as the volume of a container grows larger, the pressure inside it goes down, and the fluids, including air, always flow down their pressure gradient from high pressure to low pressure. As the pressure in our lungs goes down, air flows into them. When the diaphragm relaxes, the pressure inside the lungs
becomes higher than the air outside, and the deoxygenated air rushes out. And that is breathing. Now, it just so happens
that the circulatory system works on a pumping mechanism,
just like the respiratory system, except instead of moving air
into and out of the lungs, it moves blood into and out of the lungs. The circulatory system moves
oxygenated blood out of the lungs to the places in your body that needs it, and then brings the deoxygenated
blood back to your lungs. And maybe you're thinking,
"Whoa, what about the heart? "Isn't the heart the whole point
of the circulatory system?" Well, settle down. I'm going to explain. We're used to talking about
the heart as the head honcho of the circulatory system, and yeah, you would be in serious
trouble if you didn't have a heart. But the heart's job is to basically
power the circulatory system, move the blood all around your body, and get it back to the lungs so
that it can pick up more oxygen and get rid of the CO2. As a result, the circulatory
system of mammals essentially makes a figure 8. Oxygenated blood is pumped from
the heart to the rest of the body, and then when it makes its
way back to the heart again, it's then pumped on a shorter circuit
to the lungs to pick up more oxygen and unload CO2 before it
goes back to the heart and starts the whole cycle over again. So even though the heart
does all the heavy lifting in the circulatory system, the lungs are the home base
for the red blood cells, the postal workers that
carry the oxygen and the CO2. Now the way that your circulatory
system moves the blood around is pretty nifty. Remember when I was talking about air
moving from high pressure to low pressure? Well, so does blood. A four-chambered heart, which is
just one big honking beast of muscle, is set up so that one
chamber, the left ventricle, has very high pressure. In fact, the reason it seems
like the heart is situated a little bit to the left of center is because the left ventricle is
so freaking enormous and muscle-y. It has to be that way in order
to keep the pressure high enough that the oxygenated blood
will get out of there. From the left ventricle, the
blood moves through the aorta, a giant tube, and then through
the arteries and blood vessels that carry the blood away from
the heart to the rest of the body. Arteries are muscular and
thick-walled to maintain high pressure as the blood travels along. As arteries branch off to
go to different places, they form smaller arterioles, and finally, the very
little capillary beds, which, through their huge surface
area, facilitate the delivery of oxygen to all of the cells in
the body that need it. The capillary beds are also
where the blood picks up CO2. From there, the blood keeps
moving down the pressure gradient through a series of veins. These do the opposite of
what the arteries did. Instead of splitting off from each other, they become smaller and smaller. Little ones flow together to
make bigger and bigger veins to carry the deoxygenated
blood back to the heart. The big difference between
most veins and most arteries is that instead of being
thick-walled and squeezy, veins have thinner walls and have valves that keep the blood
from flowing backwards, which would be bad. This is necessary because the
pressure in the circulatory system keeps dropping lower and lower until
the blood flows in to two major veins. The first is the inferior vena cava, which runs pretty much
down the center of the body and handles blood coming from
the lower part of your body. The second is the superior vena cava, which sits on top of the heart and
collects the blood from the upper body. Together, they run into the
right atrium of the heart, which is the point of the lowest
pressure in the circulatory system. All this deoxygenated blood
is now back in the heart, and it needs to sop up some more oxygen. So, it flows into the right ventricle
and then into the pulmonary artery. Now arteries, remember,
flow away from the heart, even though, in this case, it
contains deoxygenated blood. And pulmonary means "of the lungs," so you know that this is
the path to the lungs. After the blood makes its way to the
alveoli and picks up some fresh oxygen, it flows to the pulmonary vein. Remember, it's a vein because
it's flowing to the heart, even though it contains oxygenated blood. And from there, it enters the heart again, where it flows into the left atrium and then into the left ventricle, where it does the whole body circuit
again and again and again and again. And that is the way that we work. Our hearts are really
efficient and awesome, and they have to be because
we're endotherms or warm-blooded, meaning that we maintain a
steady internal temperature. Having an endothermic
metabolism is really great because you're less vulnerable to fluctuations in external
temperature than ectotherms or cold-blooded animals. Also, the enzymes that do all
the work in our bodies operate over a very narrow range of temperatures. In humans, that range is between
36 and 37 degrees Celsius. But the tradeoff is that
endotherms need to eat constantly to maintain our high metabolisms
and also create heat. And for that, we need a lot of oxygen, hence the amazing efficient
four-chambered heart and our gigantic fracking lungs. Ectotherms, on the other
hand, have slow metabolisms and don't need as much in the way of food. A snake is totally pumped if
it gets a meal once a month. So since ectotherms aren't doing
much in the way of metabolizing, they don't need much in the way of oxygen, and so their circulatory systems can be a little bit janky and
inefficient and still cool. Remember back when we were tracking
the development of chordates? One of the signs of complexity was the number of chambers
in an animal's heart. Fish only have two chambers,
one ventricle and one atrium. The blood gets oxygenated as
it moves through the gills and then carries oxygen through the
rest of the body back to the heart, where it's moved through the gills again. But reptiles and amphibians
have three-chambered hearts. They've got two atria
but only one ventricle. What that means is that not all
of the blood gets oxygenated every time it makes a
full pass around the body. So oxygenated blood gets
pumped through the body and mixed up with a
little deoxygenated blood. Not super efficient, but again,
it doesn't really have to be. So there you have it, the how and why behind how oxygen
gets to all the places it needs to be. The question is what powers the diaphragm? What powers the heart? Where does that energy come from? Well, it comes from the digestive system, and that's what we're going
to be talking about next time.